Image viewer dialog window

At Opera, we do everything we can to make the web leaner and smaller, so you can get the content you want faster and use less of your precious data.

So, it’s with enormous pride that I saw Safari announce yesterday that it will be joining the other major browsers (Opera, Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge) in supporting an important piece of tech which I helped develop called the HTML picture element.

What was the problem with images on the web?

Long ago, in a galaxy far away (or 2011 in Birmingham, UK), I was pondering a complaint that I’d heard from many web developers at conferences I speak at. Their problem: if they use huge gorgeous-looking images, they might look great on high-tech devices but they need to be shrunk for others (such as feature phones). This drains your battery and hogs your data, as well. Not fun at all, especially when huge images aren’t useful on those devices in the first place.

Why were developers publishing dumb images?

Unfortunately, developers didn’t have much choice. They were using a system called the HTML img element. This element makes it so when you put an image on a page it uses just the one version of the image, which might not be a good fit for your device.